rough music or charivari

Rough Music or CharivariAuthor(s): Violet AlfordSource: Folklore, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Dec., 1959), pp. 505-518Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258223 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Folklore.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.174 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:15:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancis

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=fel

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258223?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


FOLKLORE - VOLUME 70 - DECEMBER 1959

Rough Music or Charivari

by VIOLET ALFORD

ROUGH Music is a side line in Social Anthropology which has been practically by-passed in England, brought to notice only in Folklore Notes and Queries and such journals. Well-brought-up people who like to hear about May Day hymns sung from Church towers and judges carrying posies into Court, seem to have closed their eyes to the less decorative custom of Rough Music, to have considered it so rough, so rude, that they have preferred to pronounce it dead and gone.

An Avignon Edict in 1337 calls it 'an obnoxious sport', a Statute of Beziers 1368 an iniquitous game, while Samuel Butler more temperately named it an Antique Show. Well-brought-up people and folklorists who cannot afford to be so well brought up must accept the fact that this is exactly what it is. But they may also accept the fact that the traditional custom of giving Rough Music is still alive in Europe and in our modern British Isles and that it is, to the best of my knowledge, the sole custom boasting written testimony of its existence previous to the Middle Ages.

The testimony of the Monk of St Trond, an eye-witness, records the Ship on Wheels, afterwards the famous Narrenschiff, as it was carried out of its forest in A.D. II33 still in its Pagan state. His account is treasure trove to folklorists, yet it cannot compare as regards antiquity with the testimony on the Donkey Ride more than a thousand years earlier.

Rough Music is the beginning of popular justice, the overture on pots and pans, whistles and bells, outside the house of a culprit; the second and more deadly stage is the Ride on a donkey, a ladder or a pole. The culprit, or a neighbour representing him, is seated on a donkey facing its tail which he ignominiously holds in place of reins. He is thus paraded, Rough Music accompanying him.

2N 505



ROUGH MUSIC OR CHARIVARI

The third stage is a public play, a re-enactment of the censured conduct, with a mock judgement and sentence.

Such popular justice is found all over Europe from Portugal to the Balkans, from Italy to Scotland. History is unwavering from Nicholaus Damiscenus to modern Police Records. Never was there so tenacious a characteristic of the European peoples as this will of theirs to register disapproval of acts which in themselves may not be agin the law. No Church edicts, penances, threats of excommunication, no civil imprisonments, fines, have succeeded in putting an end to the obnoxious sport.

The reasons for staging these performances, which of course overlap and intermingle in the way of all human designs, are as follows.

First the remarriage of a widow or widower, especially if the new partner is of a very different age.

Second the beating of a man by his wife. Thirdly comes adultery on the part of the wife; in former times

and now again in modern times, like conduct on the part of the husband may also bring the punishment.

After these main reasons comes a variety of others; loose conduct on the part of unmarried people - but only in such regions as do not subscribe to the older morality of proving a girl's capability for motherhood before marriage - marriage with a 'foreigner' though he be from the next village, once a perjuror is mentioned and just occasionally hatred of some public person. Sexual immorality generally incites the third degree, the immorality of a thief or a burner of haystacks is left for the police to deal with. In France, country of 'justice' outside the Law, the veriest trifles will serve as an excuse, for instance a bridegroom who did not offer gauffres to the village youth, some one who refused to subscribe for a fiddler for another man's wedding, the mother of the postman at Gallargues because she remarried a week after her son's wedding. Out of 250 examples under my hand I find 77 are for the remarriage of widows or widowers, 49 for husband-beating, 35 for adultery, 89 for other causes, 24 of which are in the special group directed at newly married couples as a communal warning and prophylactic treatment.

With one single exception every legal decree or judgement that has come to my notice, and these range from the twelfth to the

506




twentieth centuries, has been directed against disturbances at second marriages.

To these grounds must be added off-the-schedule causes such as for a schoolmaster who allowed an enraged parent of a pupil to attack him, divorce, failure to support an illegitimate child, even the jilting of a betrothed - man or girl, and always the curious preventive treatment to newly married couples, giving them the Donkey Ride, pulling them in a sled up and down a mountain path in Cantabria, making the bridegroom walk into a pond to plant a flagpole in the middle, making the newly-married men dance in the inn with horns on their heads.

The first reference we have to the Donkey Ride is by Nicholaus Damiscenus (Fragment 130)1 who states that both man and woman guilty of adultery are taken round the town on a donkey a fixed number of times. What we call Skimmington was therefore a traditional punishment in the first century B.C. In the first century A.D. Plutarch asks 'Who was the woman that rode on a donkey at Cumae?' and answers his own question thus: 'Any woman taken in adultery they used to bring into the market-place and set her on a certain stone in plain sight of everyone. In like manner they then proceeded to mount her upon a donkey, and when she had been led about the circuit of the entire city, she was required again to take her stand upon the same stone and for the rest of her life to continue in disgrace, bearing the name of "donkey-rider".'2

Originally therefore - if indeed these classical examples had not already moved far from their origin - it would seem that Rough Music and the Donkey Ride had been separate affairs. Ducange gives both Asinus and Charivari,3 the last equating our Rough Music. Sixteenth-century pictures show the donkey, pots and pans, horns and drummers, all arrayed together, so that the two must have become parts of the whole long before Ducange thus specifies them. Village people as a rule firmly believe that their assumption of justice is their right, a right acquired from some mysterious power, ranging from the Lord of the Manor in England to the Emperor Charles Quint in Picardy. In Thurston- land, Yorkshire, the right must be obtained by parading the

1 C. Miiller, Fragmenta Historicum Graecorum, III, p. 462. 2 Moralia, IV, Translation Babbitt, 1936. 3 Ducange, Glossarium, ed. 1883. (First published 1678.)

507




culprit through three townships - two would not establish it. They will assert the right if the police interfere; if summoned they will use it as a plea before the Magistrates in all good faith. A Yorkshire verse announced

Pray take warning, For this is above the law.

The Basques, whose performances in the name of morality transcend anything I know elsewhere, baldly declare in a rhymed punishment play

We have given this Charivari Because it is our right,

while in 1928 a 'monsieur' climbed on a cart in the middle of a surging mob of 1500 rough musicians at St Pierre d'Entremont in Savoy, to assure the crowd that they were within their rights and to incite them against the gendarmes.

These preliminary observations apply more or less to the whole of Europe (always with regional differences as in every branch of folklore) examples lessening towards the north until the Ork- neys, Shetland and Scandinavia produce none so far as I can ascertain.

The Names. Rough Music means precisely what it says and belongs chiefly to the south of England. The following Ride is Skimmity or a Skimmington and the word has been connected with the huge skimming ladle supposed to be carried by the wife who has beaten her man. This name is widely spread and is sometimes given to the culprit himself. Riding the Stang, belonging to the north of England, again means what it says for a stang is a pole and astride this artificial steed the culprit must ride. In France the Donkey Ride, in various dialectic forms, takes the place of the Stang as Charivari takes the place of Rough Music. In southern Europe bell-ringing is so marked a feature of the music that we find in Spain Cencerrada, in Italy far campanate or Scampanate, in the Basque lands Zinzarrotsa and Galarrotsa (a night din with bells) while the German language beginning in Alsatia, gives Katzenmusik and Eselritt. The French word Charivari is widely known and has taken strange shapes in distant countries.

The origin of this word is still questioned. A satirical paper

508




founded in Paris in 1832, publishing mordant caricatures of public personages, bore the word as its title. Punch or the London Charivari, followed suit though never so viciously, the well-known, now almost discarded cover showing Mr Punch indulging in the Donkey Ride though not in the ignominious position, surrounded by a rout of nymphs and satyrs. Practically every prohibition, ecclesiastical and secular, uses the word Charivari in one form or another.

The Instruments. Extraordinary objects are brought into use as instruments for the Rough Music. Besides the regulation pots and pans, bells and horns, we hear of the Taureau Braou in a dialect of the langue d'Oc, booming alarmingly in the night. This is a deep pot covered with skin through which a cord or a chain is drawn to and fro resulting in a hollow roar. A kneading-trough is set on sled-runners to be pulled to and fro, squeaking and groaning; cartwheels are made to turn with similar noises, even a grain-drier, ventilateur d grains, producing still worse sounds together with blasts of air, has been brought beneath the culprit's windows and pressed into use.

The Songs. Although songs of every sort are used to describe the crime and to let the criminal know what is really thought of him, I have not heard a single tune nor been able to find a printed air across the length and breadth of Europe. I have come to the con- clusion that in our islands the songs are shouted in recitative. This is partly on account of the uneven length of their lines and lack of rhythm but chiefly because nobody can remember any tune at all. Taking into account the folksong and ballad memories of our people all over the country, it seems incredible that tunes belonging to such emotional and prized occasions can be completely forgotten. Recent outbreaks furnish no more musical evidence than historical ones.

In France Van Gennep with his host of informants - this meticulous and indefatigable collector went himself all too little into the field - reports many Charivari songs and verses some with better scansion than ours, but never a tune. He mentions professional verse-makers for these occasions, particularly a certain cobbler from Villefranche while a book of Charivari songs of the seventeenth century is in the archives at Castelnaudary.4 These

*Manuel de Folklore Frangais. Paris, 1946. Vol. I, part II.

509




may have been sung to popular tunes already known. The Basque improvising poets are in the habit of selecting a well-known traditional air and fitting their verses to it. This they do not only for Charivaris but for all great occasions. When their imagination needs a lengthened line the music has to lengthen its line also to accommodate too many syllables. In western Jugoslavia the improvising poets who accompany themselves on regional instruments, do much the same, while further east the Balkan manner of recitative is certainly used for 'crying' the crimes. In Rumania this is called strigaturi.

Injuries and Deaths resulting from the people's Justice. Neither Rough Musicians nor their victims go scatheless in either body or soul. A writer in La Revue de Folklore Franfais made an inquiry into injuries caused by and at Charivaris in his region of south- west France. His results are five cases of the culprit firing on his accusers, two people blinded, two killed and one suicide. To this I add a Charivarier killed by the culprit in Belgium, one wounded and frequent firings in Portugal sometimes resulting in death, a suicide 'from remorse' in Scotland, one killed, two wounded and a suicide after the same Charivari in the Pays Basque. These tragedies merely open an unknown list.

In our own Islands we have some excellent literary descriptions written by eye-witnesses. John Stowe on Strove Monday at Charing Cross 1562, saw a true folk procession - townsfolk -

inflicting punishment on, not the culprit but his next door neighbour as his substitute, for allowing his wife to beat him. Samuel Butler in Hudibias a century later, gives a trenchant account of another London procession, hearing a din

They might distinguish different noise Of Horns and Pans and Dogs and Boys. But when the sight appeared in view They found it was an antique show.

Antique indeed as we have seen - about i8oo years old. A well-known description is that of the Skimmington adminis-

tered to Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, 'She's facing the head, he's facing the tail', and the awful realization that the effigies represented the Mayor and Lucette.

There are plenty of examples recorded: I will mention one in

51o




I860 at Leckhampton, Glos. when, says the recounter, 'the police silenced for ever the Rough Music', which assuredly they did not do.

A prolonged uproar took place at Quemerford near Calne in 1618. People came from Calne at 8 o'clock in the morning asking if a 'Skimmington dwelt there' and at noon a drummer appeared with a mob of three to four hundred men and a man with 'two shining horns hanging by his ears' riding on a horse. The quarrel- ling couple were exceedingly roughly handled and everybody had to appear before a Justice of the Peace for Wiltshire.5 This account is worth reading as an example of the lengths to which popular justice would go.

Our most original method is the Devon Stag Hunt. A man-stag, wrapped in sacking, horns on his head, ran through the town making odd whinnying noises pursued by the hunt, to end the chase on the doorstep of the person to be punished. The hounds were dressed up too and made a barking noise, a red-coated huntsman urging them on with a cracking whip. On the culprits' doorstep the stag fell down, the bladder of ox blood he carried was slit open to leave its condemnatory red pool on the step. The Hunt and the public would agree it was a 'good job done' and hoped the culprits would leave the town - which they often did. After this everyone had a drinking jollification and prided themselves on their moral outlook - I had this and more from Miss Theo Brown but it has since appeared in Folklore, Vol. 43, June 1952, where you may read the details, horrid, reprehensible and amusing.

The latest example I know - and I am surprised a still later one has not appeared in the papers - was at West Hoathley, Sussex in July 1947. There were a few uncomprehending reports of it at the time. The victim was a well-to-do man who complained to the police that the village young men made noises outside his house at night. The police mildly asked them not to do so, whereupon vague noises became the noise 'Pots and Kettles of all keys' as in Hudibras, horns, bells, drums. They continued their serenade for the regulation three nights and when asked why they did it they invoked their time-honoured 'right'. The local police told me this themselves - 'They said, "It is our right." ' Rough Music had

6 Folklore 41, 193o, p. 287-90.

51I




not been given within anyone's memory - how had they learned of the right?

FRANCE The country most appreciative of the ludum inquitatis as the

Statute of Beziers called it in 1368 is certainly France. It suits the malicious turn of mind --English 'malicious', not French 'malicieux' - of the young men, their jealousy and their esprit gallois. As in England so in La Doulce France there are literary examples, in Le Roman de Fauvel of the fourteenth century and in what is known as Le Ballet Ardent in 1393. This has been very wrongly used in Histories of the Dance. It was no sort of dance but a Charivari led by the King himself to mark the fourth marriage of one of the Queen's ladies. You will remember how he and his chain of five Courtiers dressed in frayed-out linen smeared with pitch to represent Wild Men, caught fire and how four of them were burned to death and how the fifth saved himself by plunging into a copper vessel of washing-up water in the pantry. The King, Charles VI lost the remains of his feeble wits.6

After this frightful occurrance Charivaris went gaily on and so many are recorded, so much personal evidence have I received that I must go at once to the region richest in examples. The North- East, Picardy and the South-West of France supply the best material today.

The culprit on the Donkey or his obliging next-door neighbour sits in the classical attitude holding the tail. He has an obligatory cry 'Elle m'a battu!' This must be a traditional cry for as early as 1383 a woman was led about by a self-appointed Judge, a medieval young tough named Martin, who continually called out that she had beaten her husband, while in 1417 the beaten husband himself cried to the crowd 'Que ma femme m'a battu et qu'il convient chevaucher l'ane!'

In 1950 we hear it again. In the sombre forests of the Landes they are greatly addicted to

the obnoxious sport. People have told me how the Charivari is dreaded, how they demand large quantities of wine and if not satisfied they return every night for a week. If the gendarmes appear the rough musicians just vanish into the forest. A Basque village musician had a good deal to tell me of Landais popular

6 La Chronique du R6ligieux de St Denis, Bellaguet, 1839.

512




justice for he had been engaged many a time to supply real, not Rough Music, for the Donkey Ride.

In the Pays Basque itself the custom certainly reaches its apogee. These people aiment se montrer as a young Frenchman living amongst them rightly told me. They keep alive their Pastorales, plays descended from Medieval Mysteries but with strong folk elements. We have historical records of Charivari plays from the eighteenth century, one famous example atJ Espelette going on every night for a month.

In the Soule province a Pastorale is allowed by the Pr6fet - whose authority is necessary for an outdoor theatre temporarily filling the place - but a Charivari is not. So they interpolate a Charivari scene amongst those of the Pastorale, without change of costume. One sees Sara, Abraham's wife, suddenly turn into the husband-beating woman, or Charlemagne into the much married elderly widower to be punished. The Epilogue announces in traditional manner 'You have heard our Tragedy' although the audience has been rocking with Rabelaisian laughter. The Gascon police are quite unconscious of the changes of character.

In the province of Basse Navarre the whole play, Tobera Mustrak, will be composed by local poets and enacted with dancing interludes by the Carnival Morris dancers. The plays are so scurrilous, the police who cannot mistake action although they may not understand words, interfere and the whole company, actors and dancers, cross the frontier to the nearest Spanish Basque village and carry on over there.

All this is in full flower today. In May 1950 I called on a folklorist friend, a doctor at Cambo

and rather idly asked if there had been a Charivari lately in that neighbourhood. His answer rapped out like a pistol shot: 'Last night. One killed and two wounded.'

It turned into a most remarkable affair attracting attention even in the Paris papers.

There had been rumours of an illicit love affair, both lovers married people. Then greenery was sown in the untraditional form of lime sprinkled between the two houses, one of which was an inn. Under the shuttered windows of the inn Rough Music burst out, larded with violently injurious calls. When the uproar had run its course, the group of men responsible started home down a narrow

513




lane. Two shots cracked through the darkness, one young man fell instantly, his brother was wounded in the thigh, a friend in the hand.

The Bayonne police were brought, an enquiry started. The reputed lover, a natural suspect, had one of those unshakable alibis, had been away from home that night with friends who, perhaps too eagerly, supported his statements. Suspicion then rested for a while on a certain Agarra who had himself suffered the 'greenery' some time before, linking his farm with the same inn and who, it was thought, might have taken postponed vengeance on the Charivari band of men. The 'Gascon' police could obtain nothing from the Basques questioned - they never can - and Agarra was released. When the police left, apparently uneasy in their minds, they cautioned the local gendarmes, 'You will find him in the lane where the young man was killed.'

Their psychological flair, if this is what it was, proved correct. Agarra was found hanging from the branch of an oak in a wood close to the lane. So the Charivari of Elissaberri claimed a second death.

One of the ancient customs of this country is the importance assumed by the 'first neighbour' in times of stress. When Etcheko Jaun, the Master of the House, dies, his nearest neighbour on Church side of the house, though not of the family, takes over the running of the farm or business for a few days and acts as chief mourner, following the coffin first in his long, black cloak and old- fashioned top hat. After the death of Agarra his first neighbour was duly performing his duties when, in the Church itself, he was seized with a fit of frenzy and was taken out with difficulty by friends and the doctor. While the struggle was going on the demented man cried out in true Charivari style, 'I wear the horns, and they are beating me!'

The Elissaberri Galarrotsa now claims one killed, one suicide, two wounded, one madman and - to end tragerie in comedy - his eldest son just saved from death by choking next day after swallowing a chicken bone.8

I This was the cry raised at Saintonge in 1417, p. 512. 8 All this information is from local sources and newspapers of the Sud Ouest region.

I did not learn how the funeral of a suicide came to be held in Church but Monsieur le Cure was merciful.

514




We now cross the Pyrenees which, in spite of Louis XIV still cut off Spain from Europe - only a few months ago a child yelled 'Europa!' at me in the street of Jerez de la Frontera - and find our custom in Portugal. There is alas no space for such a great and diverse land as Spain although I would have liked to make some comments on Dr Pitt Rivers' Vitos as the Charivari was called in his village and which he describes in The People of the Sierra.9

In the coastal regions of Beira Mar in Portugal they choose Shrove Tuesday for calling pulhas. The moralists dress themselves in their Sunday black, arm themselves with the enormous funnels used in wine-growing countries and go to some rising ground or a noticeable clump of trees. Four of them post themselves to face the four points of the compass. Then, the huge funnel raised to act as a megaphone, the first man shouts, his voice booming through the night

'Have you heard that Maria Coelho has a lover? She has a lover and his name is Antonio Pinto.' The second man replies through his funnel

'Yes, I have heard that Maria Coelho has a lover and that his name is Antonio Pinto.'

The third man takes up the cry, and the fourth, so that the accusa- tion is boomed to all four points of the compass.

Off they then go to another vantage spot and there repeat their cry. They travel for miles round the countryside and are much dreaded by families who have something to hide. Sometimes feeling runs so high against the self-appointed accusers that they are attacked, fired at, killed. In the villages such killing is not considered as murder, for contrary to the widely-believed 'right', crying pulhas is thought to be forbidden.

These cries ring through a large part of Portugal - even in Andalusia where they are called pregones.

We now recross the Pyrenees and indeed the whole of Europe, leaving the extraordinarily interesting variants of Charivari found in Hungary only just named. There is the Virgin Herd-Driving in East Hungary by girls against a girl who is late in marrying, the punishment of young men and girls if Carnival passes and no

O London, 1954.

515




engagements are announced and the Herald who runs through the village cracking his whip as a signal that Rough Music is about to begin.

In Serbia we find the two first degrees of punishment and also a solemn cursing which takes the place of Charivari. This ceremony is still in use and is now to discover criminals of a worse sort than those who earn a Charivari.

Each man as he utters his curse throws a stone on a pile. The pile itself becomes accursed - the Stones of Anathema. Suspected people are summoned to the cursing and if they do not appear they are considered guilty.1'

In Rumania we get the word Sharivari again, with an S. The insults are shouted in a rythmical recitative called Strigaturi. Rumania is rich in these recitatives and very striking they are. We heard examples on the arena of the Royal Albert Hall from Rumanian dancers who visited the English Folk Dance Festival. The young men appeared to be mocking their fellow dancers.

Bulgaria knows the custom in modified forms, but when we get back to the country of our first record, 100oo B.C. there we find it still in the eighteenth century and probably today, on the mainland and on the Greek island of Skyros. A French traveller - I am surprised he troubled to mention it so familiar as it must have been to him in his own France - tells us that during the Greek Carnival the Donkey Ride was administered to any lady 'belle ou laide' who had transgressed village conventions.",

While following the custom of Charivari across Europe, even at the express speed of this paper, one particular question arises -

Why, among many reasons for refusing to conform to village conventions, is only the very restricted range of reasons I began with, punished with Charivari?

The custom, its upper layers of foundation resting on the enforcement of village conventions seems to me to derive from a far deeper foundation than keeping in step with public opinion, to spring from far more vital causes. We should, I believe, reverse the proposition and enquire into the origins of the village conventions which provoke the custom.

10 T. P. Dordevi', Le Village comme fuge dans notre Droit Populaire, Belgrade 1949. Il Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d'un Voyage au Levant, 1717.

516




When reversed I am brought to believe that these conventions have arisen from three primary needs of man as once set forth by Sir James Frazer - to live, to eat, to beget children. It has always been my endeavour to look all round me for indication as to origins and not to become a fertility fanatic. But years of study of European and other folk dance and drama more often than not have obliged me to perceive a fertility foundation below other layers - often not so far below, sometimes staring one in the face.

Actions originally designed to fill those primary needs, to live, to eat, to beget children, sautent aux yeux when one takes the trouble to go oneself to look.

Living presupposes eating, eating presupposes working to obtain the food to live and to beget the next generation to carry on the task. Failure to do these things was and is to stand in the way of man's progress, in the way of Life itself and is therefore a sin against the community. In some Hungarian villages a man who refuses to work is put into the same category as a murderer.'2 The first will not use his hands, the second deprives the community of a pair of hands.

Hence also, that scorn of both childless and of unmarried people - the fining in Ireland of an unmarried man when he reaches thirty, the daubing of his doorposts, the mockery of girls who coiffent Ste Catharine - at the advanced age of twenty-five - the more than mockery, the brutality, to Swiss girls at Carnival time. In Aargau they are driven out to an open moor while others are dancing, they are put up to auction in the inn, drenched with wine, to punish them for their continued childless state. Like the Virgin Herd-driving in Hungary, 'Dame, vous devez le service de vous marier.' The Danaids, we may remember, were punished for their unmarried state by being forced to carry water in a sieve in the Nether World.

Detestation of the unmarried state works its way into folktale and folksong constantly corroborates;

The sister she went beyond the seas Where she lived an old maid with the black savagees.

and more romantically the Czech lj, na Vrbovcoch, 12 Dr Viola Tomori, A parasztsdg szemilitinek alakuldsa, 1935.

517




There at the side a girl is standing, No partner bids her join the dance.13

while the accepted end for an 'old maid' was to lead apes in Hell. Hence also those preventive Charivaris of newly married people;

the man must wear the horns, they both must take a Donkey Ride, are drenched with water, covered with bran and conversely the honours done them during their first year of marriage. They have graduated into the highest village group, and are given tasks to secure prosperity because the aura of potential parenthood envelopes them. They light the midsummer fire while cries of 'plenty of sons!' or 'Three children at a time' are heard as the flames roar up; provide the Firewheel to roll down the hill, the man must be King of the Carnival and Keeper of the funds.

If there are no children after a year's marriage the young wife will be visited and given nuts (a widely spread fertility symbol) or discover a doll in her bed.

Widows and widowers cannot expect a quiverful of children. Their remarriage is detested and gets the highest proportion of Charivaris (77 out of 250).

Again 'illicit love is frequently supposed to injure the crops' so greenery must be sown between the two houses and Rough Music must burst out beneath the windows.

But low on the list of culprits comes loose conduct in an unmarried girl. This is because in an agricultural community an extra child as the Basques say, is a welcome child, because, in the French countryside, 'C'est un signe de gloire d'avoir les enfants avant de se marier.'

Thus by the gradual lifting of layer after layer - and I could add so much more and hope to do so in a book now in preparation - we may begin to comprehend the variously understood reasons for administering folk justice.

I end with a quotation from Brand, father of British folklore.

'I might conclude this subject with an Apology, it is not of the most delicate kind. .. .'

13 Folk Songs of Europe, ed. Maud Karpeles, London, 1956.

518



rough music or charivari

Documents